Tinder poaches head of engineering from Amazon Web Services

Matchmaking mobile app Tinder has poached Jerry Heinz from Amazon Web Services, where he was head of engineering for the AppStream product.

Heinz will oversee a team of 30 at Tinder, based in Los Angeles, California, as the mobile dating platform's swipe-left/swipe-right concept continues to prove popular.

In his role at AWS, Heinz was responsible for leading the AppStream product and prior to that he worked on Test Drive, which was a feature that allowed Amazon customers to demo various products before buying them.

"What we needed was someone who has truly seen scale," Tinder CEO Sean Rad is quoted saying on dailymashable.com. "We have an incredibly smart team and they deal with this kind of scale on a daily basis because of how big we already are, but Jerry helps us move a lot faster because we can rely on the knowledge of someone who's already figured it out."

While at Tinder, Heinz will aim to ensure that relevant Tinder "matches" are served up quickly. He will also aim to make sure the platform can handle a growing number of new users and the data that comes with them.

"Conducting constant and immediate searches over millions and millions of potential matches and surfacing the best ones is a hard challenge," said Heinz. "And each new user brings even more content, profile information, and new relationships, so we're looking to keep the system up and available and the user experience snappy."

Tinder, available for free on iOS and Android, integrates with users' Facebook accouts to provide pictures and ages for other Tinder users to view. The app harnesses GPS technology to display Tinder profiles of other Tinder users within a pre-determined radius. When two users swipe right on each other's profile they are "matched" and able to start talking to one another. Last month, Tinder took a page out of Snapchat's book by offering vanishing photos known as "Moments".